'Satiable curtiosity

Ali
Thank you. That link was spot-on. I get all of them, every time. (I repair permissions, on average, twice a week, taking into account volume both of file 'traffic' and downloads.)

Interestingly, the same bunch of spuriæ come up in Jaguar, as well as in Panther.

Kappy
Thank you for your response. Ali's link gives the matter an interesting complexion, too, doesn't it.

I didn't burden the question with too much preamble deliberately. However, the Snow 500 has progressed from 9.0.4, when new, through 9.1 to (9.2.2 + 10.3.9), and the Indigo 500 from (9.2.1 + 10.1.4) to (9.2.2 + 10.3.9) to (9.2.2 + 10.2.8). The task in hand was installation of OS Z-9.1, to be followed by downloaded updates to Z-9.2.2. However, when 9.1 was rejected by the system, I was obliged to use a 9.2.1 full install (and the download to 9.2.2) instead on a small partition for booting into OS 9. Although I now have a full install of Z-9.2.1 also, the reason for the rejection is still a matter of interest, not least because I had not expected any OS 9-bootable Mac to have outgrown 9.1.

Kappy
What seems to underlie your posts is that you believe that OS 9.1 is not, at bottom, incompatible with G3 iMacs that have the correct firmware updates to run Jaguar and Panther. My expectation, too.

You can, however, discount mismatch of localized versions of OS as the cause of the problem, because, with the solitary exception of the 9.2.1 mentioned above, I have nothing but international English versions of all OSs from Z-7.0.1 to Z-10.3.x. I shall see what happens shortly when, having repartitioned the iMac Snow's HDD, I try to install OS Z-9.1 on the 4GB partition before Z-9.2.x.

Ali and Kappy
I bought a full install OS Z-9.1 directly from Apple Australia in, say, 2001, at a full install price. The CD is white, not grey, although it lacks the amber '9' of the North American English series. However, it is clearly etched into the underside of the hub that it is a Z691-2748A disc. In the years since then it has mounted on the desktops of a number of different machines, and installed OS 9.1 without difficulties. I just checked that it would mount and open on a 9500/G3 400MHz (running 9.1 installed from the same CD) and a PB 1400/G3 400MHz running OS 8.6), and it did, and also booted either machine after selection in Startup Disk.

When my Snow iMac 500MHz was booted to Z-10.3.9, the OS 9.1 CD took a considerable time to mount, but mount it did. When the OS 9.1 CD was selected as startup disk in System Preferences and the iMac was restarted, the CD was spat out (with no message), and the iMac rebooted into 10.3.9. If I booted into Z-9.2.2 on the 4GB partition of the same drive, the OS 9.1 CD did not mount, and froze the iMac until (a minute or more later) the wristwatch appeared. Another minute or so elapsed before a disk error warning window appeared. Accepting OK ejected the CD, and the iMac rebooted into OS 9.2.2.

One distinct difference between the machines that did start up from the OS 9.1 CD and the iMac is in the version of Silverlining HDD driver on the machine: 6.3.1 (PB 1400), 6.5.1 (9500) and 6.5.4 (iMac). LaCie recommended the last of these for use with their d2 Extreme external drives, and made a firmware update for the FireWire bridge available also. The difference in version of Silverlining didn't strike me until I used the 9500 and 1400 to check the OS 9.1 CD just a short time ago.

A possible further ramification of Silverlining 6.5.4 is that immediately after its installation on the Snow and Indigo iMacs, Pro Mouse-tracking under OS 9.2.2 (the machines have been maintained as dual-boot) became extremely erratic on both machines. Having four Pro Mouses available, I was able to check that this was not a mouse problem. Then, for the reasons advanced, I downgraded the Indigo to 10.2.8/9.2.2, and the mouse-tracking problem was seen no more on that machine.

But wait. There's more. Against that last fact as the basis for a hypothesis about the nefarious activity of Silverlining is the case of my wife's iMac Snow 500. Her iMac has dual-boot 10.3.9 and 9.2.2, the same Silverlining update and an external LaCie d2 drive, but not an Extreme. Her Pro Mouse has no jitters, and has never jittered since the Silverlining update. Aarrgh!